“Very little, and with good reason,” Marcus replied evenly, rounding the desk as he folded his arms and looked between the two men with a stunned expression.“The majority of hunters are said to be gone,” Marcus stated because that was what he had heard and, more importantly, what he knew.
He genuinely came to accept the explanation in his decades of living, knowing that the last hunters had died out sometime within his true twenties.They weren't exactly made to last.Humans who did such stupid things as chasing down the tails of shifters often found themselves meeting untimely ends.It shouldn't have been surprising to anyone that the hunters of days of yore were long gone.But every now and again, a whisper would show up on the wind.The rumor mill would gossip that there was a possibility that said hunters still existed, that they were lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to reintegrate themselves into society and correct the natural order of things.Marcus had always thought that it was nothing more than gossip, mindless and pointless.Everyone knew that the things that you've heard murmured in the corner of rooms weren't exactly supposed to be taken as fact.
Most of the time.
But sometimes, even he began to wonder, a small part of him knowing that so long as humans were alive, there were always going to be ones who stumbled into information that they didn't need and that hatred was something that came as naturally to some humans as breathing.Some of them would never learn to live in harmony with shifters.Some of them would never accept the fact that in this world, they hadn't been born amongst the privileged few, the ones who were chosen to be special and important.To many humans, that was an insult.
There was a possibility, Marcus hated to admit to himself, that hunters were still around.They had just been hiding in the corners.
That possibility was only further reaffirmed by Shawn’s words moments later, the ones that sent a shiver down Marcus’s spine and made him wish that he could turn back time to silently review every single interaction that he had had with his mate’s mother before.“We think that Annabel might have ties to the hunters,” Shawn said, further worrying Marcus.
He didn't know what to do.Instinctually, his hands reached out to the side of the desk, studying himself as his heart began to race, his mind struggling to come to terms with the idea that there could still be hunters out there, and they could be so close to his mate of all things.Marcus wasn’t normally one to worry about much of anything but in this case?He felt a tingle go up his spine, his breath hitching as he struggled to come to terms with it all.
“And why, exactly,” Marcus said, licking his lips as he spoke carefully, choosing every word with a great deal of precision and care as if the amount of attention that he paid to such a thing would really matter.“… Why would you think that?”He struggled to get out after another moment, willing Shawn to just have a hunch, nothing more.He could live with a hunch.
But solid, unquestionable evidence?
Marcus’s age began to show in his concern regarding that.
He was old.Old enough to have heard stories of the hunters, to have seen what they were capable of in their dying days.He knew people then who had been friends with those who were hunted- never ones who had been hunted themselves, largely because those people didn’t exist.
The nature of hunting society didn’t allow for that.
If one hunter were to die in pursuit of a target, then the contract for the target would go back on the market.They would encourage another hunter to take over, finishing the work of their fallen comrade.It was part of how hunters operated, a significant part of their honors system.The idea was that finishing the work of the dead allowed them to have a peaceful afterlife, and therefore, hunter families would pay thousands of dollars to other hunters in order to encourage them to take on failed targets.
Escaping from one hunter didn't mean that you got to live the rest of your life in peace.It just meant that you got to wait a little longer for the new one to come after you, and waiting was the worst part.Waiting could drive a shifter crazy.
And yet, when asked for evidence, Shawn was more than capable of providing it.Marcus honestly should have figured it out.Shawn had proven from the very beginning that he was nothing if not resourceful, perhaps a little too much.
The moment that he had decided to hold Marcus’s gaze, reaching behind him and presenting him with the thick file folder, Marcus wanted to cry.And then, of course, because he was a glutton for punishment and obviously hated himself to such a great extent, Marcus obliged the other man and decided to flip through the files, reading information about shifter after shifter, far too detailed information about shifter after shifter.There were notes about their schedules, their medical ailments, their diets, as well as their acquaintances and anyone that they talked to on a regular basis.It was pure nightmare fuel unless you were the person who just so happened to be paying lesser hunters who hadn't yet earned their pelt (the shifter fur that they would display prominently upon their walls after having taken their hunting vows), then the information was likely delightful.
Marcus had long heard rumors that the hunters had a society like this.They had never held evidence that proved that everything that people feared was correct.The legend that younger hunters set out to use their skills to spy on shifters in great detail had been little more than a ghost story for people to tell around the campfire in Marcus’s original pride, the few elders that were unfortunate enough to know people who had passed in the line of hunter fire spreading the legends—he wondered how those elders would react if they knew that it was true.
Hell, he wondered how just about any shifter would react if they knew that the legends were true and then been handed a file folder filled with pictures of other shifters to boot.He knew a few of them.He'd conversed with some of the older shifters, running across them in his travels when he was young, and had decided to track across the European continent.But still, a few of them were strangers to him, which he took as a reassurance until he began to see faces from his own pride.
And then he saw them.
El and Destiny, the lights of his life.
For so long, Marcus had gone through life simply dreaming of having a mate, slogging through every day with the hope that someday, he and his triad would find the one who would complete them.And then he found her, and more than that, he had been blessed by the mother, gifted with a perfect baby girl that so closely resembled her mother that he couldn’t help but feel like El’s eyes were upon him every time that Destiny looked his way.
He should have known that such undeniable happiness was only temporary, that he would only be allowed a few days alone with his mate, fucking her on the lawn or bouncing his baby girl on his knee.
The problem with prophecies was that once they were fulfilled, all the people who had spent so long trying to prevent them from happening?Yeah, they just so happened to wish that things would revert to normal, and in reverting to normal, they did everything they could to destroy the progress that had occurred.
Marcus should have known from the very beginning that far more than just other shifter clans would see the possible merger of the Pantera and the Pride as a bad thing.He should have known that his daughter would not be welcome with open arms everywhere.There was always someone watching from the sidelines, always someone wishing to course correct and stop progress before it could begin.In this case, it was a group of humans who would likely see the two largest shifter packs in the area looking to merge and had decided to stop the action before it could so much as dream of happening.
“I’ll help you,” Marcus said immediately upon holding his daughter’s face in his trembling hands, feeling like he had no other option but to agree to it.But at the end of the day, he did have one choice in the matter, and he made it right then and there.“I’m coming with you.”
Chapter11
Hour after hour, Ryan had been upset to see that the day was not turning out to his liking, but everywhere he turned, it felt like people were conspiring against him, wanting to force his hand so that he had to give his daughter to people that he didn't trust.First, it was the meeting with the Pantera, and then it was the fact that El had texted him, requesting his presence at her former family home.She knew that there was no way that he could say no to her, not when she was one of the very many lights in his life, but the fact of the matter was, there was no way that Ryan could anticipate the fact that his triad brothers would still be missing in action by the time that he came home, leaving little to no indication of what they were up to, other than a short, rather abrupt text message from Trip stating that a business meeting was running long.
“Six hours long?”Ryan murmured to himself as he glared down at the phone, knowing that few, if any, meetings took that long, not unless it was a particularly pesky investor who needed more convincing.But even if that were the case, even if Trip had to take them out to a few nightclubs and stuff like that, did he have to take Shawn and Marcus as well?
The trio had left recently.Ryan knew that.He could still smell the scent of Marcus on El’s sheets, and Trip and Shawn’s scents sat heavily in the halls as he passed the door to Shawn’s office by, surprised to find it open and unlocked for once, but with no one inside.It was all strange, to say the least.But it was not the strangest part of his day by far.
No, that belonged to El.El and her insistence that they actually go to see the mother-in-law from hell.
